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James Daschuk recalls sneaking into Costco with an outdated membership card to see it with his own eyes: his book, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, stacked high on a table next to the latest David Baldacci thriller. The sight was all the more sweet for the fact that the book, the product of his PhD dissertation, almost didn’t see the light of day. Dr. Daschuk, a historian and an associate professor at the University of Regina, spent nearly a decade shaping his research into a manuscript for U of R’s Canadian Plains Research Center Press. Then, as he neared completion in 2012, news came down that the university was closing the centre and possibly its publications arm, too. “I thought my project was cursed,” Dr. Daschuk says.

But, as luck would have it, the university did quite the opposite: in 2013, U of R brought in Bruce Walsh, a former director of marketing for literary trade publisher McClelland & Stewart, as director to ramp up the press’s output from 10 titles a year to 20 (they’re working up to 30), and to rebrand the division as University of Regina Press. Read the complete story in University Affairs...